Akamai Technologies

Akamai has transformed the Internet from a chaotic network into a predictable, scalable, and secure business platform. With its headquarters located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Akamai Technologies, Inc. maintains a massive distributed computer network, composed of more than 15,000 servers in more than 65 countries. The network provides software and services to help companies, government entities, and other customers ensure reliable delivery of web content and applications. Rather than just supplementing a customer's server capacity, in effect acting as a mirror site or caching service, Akamai uses sophisticated programming to monitor web traffic, makes extra copies of high-demand content, and spreads out requests, routing them to a server in the geographic proximity of the end user. In this way, customers do not have to maintain an excessive number of servers to handle peak traffic and are able to weather usage spikes without overloading their systems. In addition, Akamai offers an array of professional services, including Internet architectural design, implementation, performance optimization, and security. Akamai maintains offices in nine U.S. cities, as well as offices in Europe and the Pacific Rim. Originally developed by the U.S. military, the Internet was little more than a collection of linked computers before Dr. Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist, invented a software program in 1989 called the World Wide Web, which provided easy access to the quickly accumulating resources of the Internet. The program supplied an address (universal resource locator, or URL) to documents, which were encoded with hypertext markup language (HTML), and linked for easy retrieval by hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). Coupled with a graphic interface, Mosaic, which became the backbone of web browsers, the Internet enjoyed explosive growth in the 1990s. Berners-Lee joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1994, heading the W3 Consortium for the Laboratory for Computer Science, very much devoted to making sure the Web developed into the universal tool he envisioned it to be. But by 1995 he became concerned that traffic problems could have a deleterious effect on the growth of the Web, in particular the "hot spot" or "flash crowd" phenomenon, when large numbers of web users try to access the same site at the same time, leading to a bottleneck that would not only bring down a site but create a domino effect, with the network around the site becoming a casualty. Moreover, the future of the Internet was jeopardized because of a general lack of speed, leading wags to call the Internet the "World Wide Wait." In 1995 Berners-Lee issued a challenge to his MIT colleagues to improve the way in which Internet content was delivered. From the outset Akamai boasted an impressive roster of clients, including Yahoo, CNN, About.com, and Go Network. The first product was called FreeFlow. The service, as described by Network World in a January 1999 profile, "delivers customers' web pages via Akamai's global network of distributed web servers. ... The Akamai network determines where hits are coming from and shifts copies of the pages sought to Akamai servers nearest the source of the demand. When demand drops, the network cuts back on the number of servers delivering content. Customers don't have to add hardware or change Internet access to use the service. With faster response times, Akamai customers will be able to post more complex pages." FreeFlow was able to achieve this feat because "the network uses server software based on a blend of four families of algorithms: randomized, online, flow and consistent hashing. The software runs on each server, distributing intelligence around the network so adjustments are made without intervention from a central site. ... If one server goes down, others become aware and pick up the slack." FreeFlow was put to the test in October 1999 when it was used by NetAid to support th